This discussion is coming close to some of the issues that the STILE
project has been considering. We wish to provide students and staff
at participating Universities with there own Web space. Then to
provide tools for adding and modifying their data, and annotating and
linking to other data. (The tools will, initially at least, only
allow the creation and modification of Web documents conforming to a
STILE format - we are don't have the programmer time to develop full
HTML editors.)

Contraints of disk space and ownership mean that a system allowing
annotations to be written to other people's disk space or even to
large common areas are not likely to win favour in a University
environment. The closest thing we have considered to true
annotation then is building web space that links to other
people's documents, and in some cases, contains,
possibly modified, copies of them.

The owner of the referenced documents can be emailed (eg) to let
them know that their documents have been referenced, or maybe
they just discover the fact themselves while browsing/searching.
They are then at liberty to decide whether to add a link to the
referencing documents.

We too are investigating the possibilities of providing such
facilities using CGI scripts and NCSA Forms. It looks possible, but
fairly messy, requiring transmission of user name and passwords for
every update (security hole?!), and the use of hidden fields to
contain contextual information.

If this discussion is going elsewhere, I would like to know
where please.